Venuelabs Unveils Klout-Like Business Scores

The influencer scoring market just got a little more interesting as Venuelabs (formerly Valuevine) recently launched something it’s calling VenueRank. The tagline treatment is that it’s sort of a Klout score for businesses, but that actually isn’t a very apt description. It’s similar in that a single location of a business — a storefront — gets a numeric value based on a number of online metric indicators. But it has less to do with influence and more to do with how the business is faring in the online world.

It’s kind of a digital marketing Q-Score.

The service was launched at the GeoLoco Conference in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. TechCrunch covered it with a nice round up and some screen grabs as well. Check out their piece for more news-type coverage of it.

The thought to put a performance score on geographic locations of a business based on its online performance is interesting, even if it does bring a lot of attention to a brand or franchise’s geo-location woes, which Venuelabs can conveniently fill with their other services. Yeah, this is a gimmicky way to make companies more aware that their online engagement, reach, community or sentiment isn’t just tied to their brand. It’s also tied to their locations.

But regardless of the fact the VenueRank is a neat lead and interest generator for Venuelabs, applying this type of location-by-location scoring to brands is damn interesting.

For perhaps the first time, franchise and multiple-location businesses can get a Q-score like index for their online marketing efforts, either in aggregate or by location. A Jamba Juice brand manager can see that they have a 75 overall score, but can the break it down and see that location 47 has a 47 which can help them find the weak links and fix them.

VenueRank apparently bases its score on the reach a brand or store has (is it represented across multiple platforms), the level of engagement they have (comments, likes, check-ins, etc.), a community score (follower counts, etc.) and customer happiness (based on sentiment scores around comments tied to the store or brand). The service allows its customers to compare storefronts within a brand, across brands (for side-by-sides with competition), groups of stores within and across brands and trend location scores over time.

While there’s still some unknowns about the algorithms and wide adoption stands in the way of VenueRank really mattering on scale, big brand retailers and franchise businesses can get a lot of usefulness out of the tool, even if just for system optimization. The big appeal here is that someone has figured out a way for a brand manager to look at a map of stores, each with a 0-100 number attached to them and see where problem areas in digital marketing might be rising on the local level.

Even if the algorithm is flawed or immature, it’s a easy button for judging a vast array of stores. It’s a start. And many brands will probably like having that.

You can visit VenueRank.com and submit a simple form to get a teaser of your scores based on your brand name. I’m sure filling that form out gives you some decent information and plenty of places to contact Venuelabs for more information in applying the ranks across your brand. As I understand it, the initial report is free.